William James has long been recognized as a central figure in the American philosophic tradition, and his ideas continue to play a significant role in contemporary thinking. Yet there has never been a comprehensive exploration of the thought of this seminal philosopher and psychologist. In Experiencing William James, renowned scholar James Campbell provides the fuller and more complete analysis that James scholarship has long needed. Commentators typically address only pieces of James's thought or aspects (...) of his vision, often in an attempt to make the task of understanding James seem easier than it is or else to dismiss him as a philosophically unprepared if well-meaning amateur. The isolated nature of these examinations, too often divorced from the original contexts, badly hinders and even distorts their conclusions. Focusing on James's own ideas rather than his critiques of others, and drawing from a wealth of scholarship that includes the completed editions of his writings and correspondence, Experiencing William James provides an invaluable, comprehensive view of James as he participates in and advances the pragmatic spirit that is at the core of American philosophy. Taking the whole of the man's thinking into account, this book offers the richest perspective so far on this great but not fully comprehended intellectual. (shrink)

Mr Burston's introduction relates the two pieces to Mill's general intellectual and philosophical position, and to the historical context in which he wrote. Notes explain allusions in the text, and there is a bibliography.

In this book, he also demonstrates a skill shared by the greatest radical thinkers: to reveal positions we've been taught to think of as extremism to be emanations of simple human decency and common sense.

This paper is about the similarity between the appreciation of a piece of art, such as a cherished music album, and the loving appreciation of a person whom one knows well. In philosophical discussion about the rationality of love, the Qualities View (QV) says that love can be justified by reference to the qualities of the beloved. I argue that the oft-rehearsed trading-up objection fails to undermine the QV. The problems typically identified by the objection arise from the idea that (...) love-worthy qualities could be coarse-grained, when in fact they must be fine-grained. The analogy with appreciation of aesthetic qualities helps to draw out this point. Once the fine-grained nature of love-worthy qualities is properly understood, it is clear that critics of the QV cannot rely on the trading-up objection to motivate its rejection. Moreover, the paper’s core argument helps to illuminate the persistently aesthetic nature of interpersonal affections. (shrink)

In the _World Library of Educationalists_, international experts themselves compile career-long collections of what they judge to be their finest pieces – extracts from books, key articles, salient research findings, major theoretical and practical contributions – so the world can read them in a single manageable volume, allowing readers to follow the themes of their work and see how it contributes to the development of the field. Mary James has researched and written on a range of educational subjects (...) which encompass curriculum, pedagogy and assessment in schools, and implications for teachers´ professional development, school leadership and policy frameworks. She has written many books and journals on assessment, particularly assessment for learning and is an expert on teacher learning, curriculum, leadership for learning and educational policy. Starting with a specially written introduction in which Mary gives an overview of her career and contextualises her selection, the chapters are divided into three parts: Educational Assessment and Learning Educational Evaluation and Curriculum Development Educational Research and the Improvement of Practice Through this book, readers can follow the different strands that Mary James has researched and written about over the last three decades, and clearly see her important contribution to the field of education. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Our Living SocietyJames CampbellIWhen I was working on my history of the early years of the American Philosophical Association (A Thoughtful Profession), I spent a great deal of time immersed in the unhappy genre of the presidential address. Three divisions, each with its own annual president, make for a lot of presidential addresses. One of the things that I learned from this effort was that these addresses can be (...) sorted quite easily into two types. The first reflects some philosophical interest of the individual president; the second considers the ongoing life of the association. My presidential address will be of the latter sort.I thought that I would speak with you today about the Society for the Advancement of American Philosophy (SAAP) as a living society. To do so means, of course, that I will be speaking about us. "We" are the members of SAAP—or better, we are SAAP. I will address my remarks primarily to the younger members of the audience: to those who cannot recall a time before SAAP existed. As our Society moves forward, and as the members of the founding generation inevitably pass on, there has been a natural change of focus. Our Society was established nearly forty years ago, at a time when the founders felt great alienation from the American Philosophical Association. The issues that brought them together in the early-1970s, however, are not the issues that we are facing at present. Our issues—your issues as the future of the Society—have fundamentally changed. It is no longer possible, if it ever really was, to define ourselves simply as "not them." We need to articulate, better than we have, not so much who we are as who we desire to become. While our pluralistic ways may no longer stick out in the broader philosophical profession, as Walt Whitman would in a Wall Street brokerage house, we [End Page 128] continue to feel isolation from much of what goes on in the profession. In many ways, SAAP's initial phase has been a tremendous success; but where does SAAP, where do we, go from here?III thought that I might also speak a bit about myself, not because my story is so special, but because it is a small piece of our collective past. Others of you may remember these times differently and may have taken away different lessons. If you will allow me, I will begin my story after I left the Army in 1969 and enrolled at Temple University in Philadelphia, where I had grown up. I was at that time a bit older, and more serious, than most of my fellow students. I enrolled as a philosophy major because, after a number of years entrapped within the military system of blind obedience to unquestioned authority, I wanted to find better justifications for my own, and for society's, practices. Philosophy appealed to me as the place where I might find the answers to my life questions.Unfortunately, philosophy in those days—at Temple and at most other American universities—was not the sort of field in which students found many answers to the questions that puzzled me. We learned a great deal about duck-rabbits and the uncertain location of someone named Brown; we wondered whether a person might know how to sex chickens, and how he or she might know; we explored the apparent menace of female impersonators' conventions for the inherited notion of truth. Overall, philosophy seemed to be a branch of epistemology, rather than vice versa. After several years of this sort of philosophical study, I managed to become very clever. I had a counter-example for any statement more daring than "hello," and I thought that I knew a great deal because I had learned how to avoid all consideration of context or history.Still, through my cleverness, I realized that something was not right. I was not developing answers for my puzzlements about life or the improvement of society. Since I was not doing what I wanted to do in philosophy, the fact that I was doing it quite well mattered little. As I look back now through the eyes... (shrink)

An opinion piece discussing the role of the realist novel and the concept of realism itself when reality seems so deranged in light of Trump, Brexit and the present Anglo-American crisis of legitimacy. The essay also acts as a critical-reflective 'companion' to my novel 'UnAmerican Activities' as the final part - calling for writers to respond with a 'deranged realism' - articulate the aesthetic behind my latest novel.

Yoga is hugely popular around the world today, yet until now little has been known of its roots. This book collects, for the first time, core teachings of yoga in their original form, translated and edited by two of the world's foremost scholars of the subject. It includes a wide range of texts from different schools of yoga, languages and eras: among others, key passages from the early Upanisads and the Mahabharata, and from the Tantric, Buddhist and Jaina traditions, with (...) many pieces in scholarly translation for the first time. Covering yoga's varying definitions across systems, models of the esoteric and physical bodies, and its most important practices, such as posture, breath control, sensory withdrawal and meditation, Roots of Yoga is a unique and essential source of knowledge. (shrink)

In March 2015, a Falun Gong practitioner began an extended email assault on an Australian academician, an academician who had written about the confrontation between this practitioner’s movement and the People’s Republic of China in ways that the practitioner deemed overly critical of Falun Gong. This person demanded that the academician retract her article, implicitly threatening to defame her, her university, and the journal in which her piece appeared, and, possibly, file a lawsuit if she did not accede to his (...) demands. Though most non-specialists think of Falun Gong as a peaceful spiritual exercise group unjustly persecuted by Chinese authorities, it has a dark, little-known history of forcibly silencing critics. In turn, this pattern of repression is tied in with an esoteric theory of karma which prompts practitioners of Falun Gong to actively seek persecution and martyrdom. (shrink)

In this essay, I explore a documentary about the curious case of Charlie and his Orchestra. While swing music was outlawed in Nazi Germany as “degenerate,” the Nazi regime created a radio program called “Charlie and his Orchestra” for foreign consumption. The propaganda lay in the changes to the original lyrics of the songs played, making them convey the anti-Semitic and other themes of the Nazi ideology. The review discusses just how good the musicians were, and how popular the program (...) was. (shrink)

Rather than representing a break with his earlier philosophical undertakings, The Birth of Tragedy can be seen as continuous with them and Nietzsche's later works. James Porter argues that Nietzsche's argumentative and writerly strategies resemble his earlier writings on philology in his 'staging' of meaning rather than in his advocacy of various positions. The derivation of the Dionysian from the Apollinian, and the interest in the atomistic challenges to Platonism, are anticipated in earlier works. Also the theory of the (...) all-too-human subject is a thread that runs throughout Nietzsche's oeuvre, critically undoing what his philosophy appears to erect, confirming that Nietzsche is a most unreliable witness to his own meaning. As well as studying the relation of The Birth of Tragedy to later writings, the author examines it on its own terms as a self-standing and complete piece of imagining, with close regard to the self-presentation of the work itself. (shrink)

Self to Self brings together essays on personal identity, autonomy, and moral emotions by the distinguished philosopher J. David Velleman. Although each of the essays was written as an independent piece, they are unified by an overarching thesis, that there is no single entity denoted by 'the self', as well as by themes from Kantian ethics, psychoanalytic theory, social psychology, and Velleman's work in the philosophy of action. Two of the essays were selected by the editors of Philosophers' Annual as (...) being among the ten best papers in their year of publication. Aimed primarily at professional philosophers and advanced students, Self to Self will also be of interest to psychologists and others who theorize about the self. (shrink)

Fifty-five word stories have proven a useful reflective tool across medicine. This short piece details an episode in which ‘leadership’ came up short. Leadership has to make itself present.

James Mill (1773-1836) is today best known as Jeremy Bentham's chief disciple and John Stuart Mill's father. Yet Mill himself was a formidable and important Utilitarian thinker in his own right, who earned the respect of even those who disagreed with him. His range was enormous (historian, political philosopher, psychologist, educational theorist, and economist), repeatedly crossing the disciplinary boundaries we take for granted today. This volume presents a wide sampling of Mill's political writings and polemical essays. It begins with (...) his classic work, the Essay on Government, it also includes pieces on the protection of rights, the importance of education, the free press, the secret ballot, and government's use of punishment against those who violate the rights of fellow citizens. The collection concludes with Macauley's famous critique of the Essay, and Mill's heretofore unnoticed reply in his Fragment on Mackintosh (1835). This is the first time that such a selection of Mill's political works has appeared as one volume. (shrink)

The Great Speech of Protagoras in Plato’s dialogue is now widely seen as an expression of democratic theory, one of the earliest substantial expressions of democratic theory on record. At the same time, there have long been arguments to the contrary, the most formidable presentation of which is an article by Peter Nicholson that appeared in these pages in 1981. In this short piece, I address Nicholson’s skeptical arguments head-on and in full, in a way that has not yet been (...) done. By doing so, I hope to put skeptical arguments of this sort to rest, and to confirm Protagoras’ Great Speech once and for all as an early, and very interesting, fragment of democratic theory. (shrink)

Nature, as Spinoza conceives of it, contains individual things or finite modes, each with its own essence. Although we humans classify individuals into kinds, Spinoza is adamant that the resulting types or species “are nothing”. Despite Spinoza's nominalism, his mature works posit differences between animal kinds that are discoverable by reasoning and available to philosophical understanding. Spinoza's world is fluid in the sense that the powers of individuals are in flux, changing as they interact with one another. In Spinoza's view, (...) changes in an individual's power are typically the effects of its interactions with external things. Spinoza contrasts the affective dynamics between human natures with a lack of affective commonality between humans and other kinds of animals. In his political works Spinoza translates his account of natures or essences into juridical terms. The claim that mutual sociability is what makes an animal kind is of a piece with the rest of Spinoza's philosophy. (shrink)

The doctrine of the Eucharist has been one of the more fruitful locales of philosophical reflection within Christian theology. The central philosophical question has been, ‘what is the state of affairs such that it is apt to say of a piece of bread, “This is the body of Christ”?’ In this article, I offer a delineation of various families of answers to this question as they have been proffered in the history of the church. These families are distinguished by how (...) they view the presence of the body of Christ as well as the continued presence of the bread and wine after consecration. I then provide a specific examination of some recent attempts to explicate these views. A number of the recent work has focused on the Roman Catholic doctrine of transubstantiation, but I also survey consubstantiation, transignification, and a recent revival of impanation as potential means for describing the metaphysical realities of the Eucharist. (shrink)

Throughout history, almost all mathematicians, physicists and philosophers have been of the opinion that space and time are infinitely divisible. That is, it is usually believed that space and time do not consist of atoms, but that any piece of space and time of non-zero size, however small, can itself be divided into still smaller parts. This assumption is included in geometry, as in Euclid, and also in the Euclidean and non- Euclidean geometries used in modern physics. Of the few (...) who have denied that space and time are infinitely divisible, the most notable are the ancient atomists, and Berkeley and Hume. All of these assert not only that space and time might be atomic, but that they must be. Infinite divisibility is, they say, impossible on purely conceptual grounds. (shrink)

Jacques Brunschwig’s collection of papers, Études sur les philosophies Hellénistiques: Epicurisme, stoïcisme, Scepticisme follows close on the heels of his similar, though not identical, Papers in Hellenistic Philosophy. It performs the same valuable service for Francophone readers that was performed for Anglophone readers by the English volume: it makes available for the first time in French articles that originally appeared in English along with a selection of pieces first published in French. The only serious complaint I can imagine against (...) either volume concerns the decision to exclude certain pieces from each. Yet one should not be greedy; this is a splendid collection which gives ample cause for gratitude as it is. (shrink)

This paper pursues a Kantian critique of Husserl’s theory of moral consciousness as it is found in his lectures on ethics and other shorter pieces on political and moral philosophy from the interwar period. The critique centers on Kant’s conception of moral personality, arguing that Husserl fails to appreciate the force of this idea, subsequently leaving himself open to the charge of moral perfectionism. The paper ends with a positive assessment of Husserl’s thought, however, arguing that Husserl provides important (...) resources for understanding moral consciousness as a sensibility for the possible, adding an important dimension to approaches in ethics that tend to center exclusively on questions of motivation and principle. (shrink)

The thesis of the dissertation is that Husserl's phenomenological analyses of the human body are important in assessing the claim that phenomenology provides the basis for a "transcendental idealism". The central role of these analyses is to reconcile the sense of consciousness as a world-creating transcendental synthesis and as an empirical self: if successful, Husserl's idealism could boast a sensitivity to the empirical that would significantly augment its plausibility. ;The argument begins by setting up the problem vis-a-vis the experience of (...) the other person. The issue at hand is how the body of the other person expresses the presence of a consciousness. Yet the question that guides the analysis is: if "consciousness" means a world-creating, transcendental synthesis , then in what sense can we speak of an empirical consciousness that belongs to the world, thus of a person standing before us ? Part of the answer, it is asserted, lies in the expressive nature of a person's body: that is, the human body is a concrete thing in the world that yet expresses the sense of consciousness as world-creating, thereby providing for it a "worldly", empirical manifestation. ;The main part of the dissertation is a presentation of Husserl's analyses of the human body, which is described as a threefold unity of extension, materiality, and time. An understanding of each of these dimensions provides a piece of the puzzle as to how the body of the other is expressive of consciousness. ;The study ends with the problem of phenomenology as a transcendental idealism. The conclusion is that, for Husserl, consciousness is the condition for the manifestation of the "world" only as an empirical, bodily consciousness. I believe the tenability of this position can be demonstrated through Husserl's phenomenology of the human body, where the body is understood as a special mode of the expression of consciousness. For these analyses, taken as a whole, lend to his idealism a subtlety that significantly boosts both its plausibility and the force of its presentation. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:34 Feminist Studies 47, no. 1. © 2021 by Feminist Studies, Inc. James Bliss Defense, Redemption, Care: Black Feminist and Queer Studies Literary theory continues to be received by some as if it were an alien or antagonistic presence from whose leaden and reductive grasp it is imperative to keep literature protected. It is rare, however, that it is the literary, as such, that is being protected, rather (...) than a certain comfortable accommodation with it—not irreducible strangeness and surprise, but the security of knowing that one’s expectations will be fulfilled and one’s competence as a reader rewarded. The pleasures of accommodation and immediate assimilation are the first that theory asks us to forego—which may do as much to make it seem forbidding and “inhumane” as anything it actually proposes. —Elizabeth W. Bruss1 I. Theory Not for the first time, we find ourselves building new genres. Pursuing new writings. Not for the first time, the theoretical and the literary envelope, eclipse, and rearticulate one another. What’s more, the theoretical has been a mode of artistic practice for so long that every page is a palimpsest, a sedimentation of sedimentations of conceptual frames— swirled, spiraling genealogies. Fluent in invented tongues, in the idioms 1. Elizabeth W. Bruss, Beautiful Theories: The Spectacle of Discourse in Contemporary Criticism (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1982), 483. 35 James Bliss Books Discussed in This Essay Black Feminism Reimagined: After Intersectionality. By Jennifer C. Nash. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2019. None Like Us: Blackness, Belonging, Aesthetic Life. By Stephen Best. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2018. Sensual Excess: Queer Femininity and Brown Jouissance. By Amber Jamilla Musser. New York: NYU Press, 2018. Queer Times, Black Futures. By Kara Keeling. New York: NYU Press, 2019. of invention, in the fluid looseness of disintegrated discourses, our works turn singular. The monograph as signature. The page promises to freeze the text, the object, the artwork, the lifeworld, the performance, and in that stillness to teach us its movements. New moves, secret passageways, lines of escape and gaps in the walls of institutions that die, dissolve, and ossify around and inside us. And here we are. The permanent apocalypse that racial capitalism has been for most life has reached the quadrangles of the college campus. What are we even doing anymore? In the great and dreadful remaking of higher education, as students face permanent indebtedness as the cost of entry into a world without work, what is the ethical impetus for our researches and the systems within which we publish? What are the ethics of critical cultural studies in a debt mine? By what arithmetic do we benefit the students we teach to “steal from the university ” when the university is so much more adroit at stealing from them (and us)? At the same time that the contours of our professional lives are, apparently, unraveling, we find ourselves in (another) new renaissance in Black studies and Black study. We find ourselves within (another) new moment of textual production around the trio of race/gender/sexuality— that is, around Blackness or around Black feminism. 36 James Bliss Or, Black invention—where the Black female, femme, feminine, and maternal operate as synecdochic figures for a species of poiēsis.2 In the 1980s, Jacques Derrida wryly called California the “state of theory” as a function of its tectonic instability.3 In the 2010s, Blackness became the state of theory as a function of its coincidence of death and life, ending and beginning, absence and excess, apocalypse and invention. Blackness, in this instance, is as material as it is metaphor, a projection of meaning across both the great ephemeral skin and the body as flesh. This piece emerges from a sense of the necessity and the hazards of an intellectual history of a moment during which, to take a suggestive phrase from Jared Sexton, “Blackness is theory itself, anti-blackness the resistance to theory.”4 But already language presents an issue. What is the relationship between Sexton’s “theory” and the “theory” found in the epigraph from Elizabeth Bruss? Or, between Sexton’s “theory” and Lewis R. Gordon’s “theory,” as Sexton borrows from Gordon’s “Theory in... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Integralism and Justice for AllJames Dominic Rooney O.P.Catholic integralism has received a lot of attention recently, promoted by pundits and scholars alike.1 Much ink has been spilled in scholarly venues discussing historical evidence marshaled by defenders of integralism who argue that the Catholic Church has rights to the coercive power of the state in service of its religious mission, notably Thomas Pink.2 My interest in this piece is different. (...) I aim simply to show that integralism is unjust. To prove this, I propose two problems that illustrate the integralist position entails violations of distributive justice concerning the rights of non-Catholics. It is important to highlight that my argument that integralism is unjust will not require denying Pink's controversial views about the power of the Church to direct state policy. In other words, I presume the truth of Catholicism and Pink's controversial readings of Church documents, but show that these readings do not allow us to arrive at the view that integralism is true. What my argument attacks is not that the Church has such powers, but that there is any identifiable "ideal" political arrangement in which these powers are exercised.Pink has attempted to show that—contrary to popular perception—the [End Page 1059] Second Vatican Council's declaration on religious freedom, Dignitatis humanae (DH), is compatible with integralist positions. Appealing to arguments given by Francisco Suarez, Pink argues that the Church has rights to the coercive power or authority of the state. On this reading, "the authority to direct and coerce in matters religious...belongs to the Church. It no more belongs to the state than it belongs to private individuals."3 Instead, the Church is a coercive authority which can impose "temporal penalties" on its members.4 Further, the baptized acquire obligations to lend the Church their temporal authority in service of its mission; thus, "rulers and officials of Christian states—[fulfill] their baptismal obligations to the Church in lending her their power and resources to hold other baptized Christians to their baptismal obligations."5 Consequently, the Church has a right, given its coercive authority to impose temporal penalties on its members, to the temporal power which baptized rulers hold, in service of its mission.6Pink's interpretation of what was called the Church's "indirect power" over government therefore involves a strong thesis that the Church has God-given rights to utilize civic coercion for its own supernatural ends. I will refer to this controversial thesis about "indirect power" as the "Suarezian thesis" (but will not be concerned with whether his view accurately represents Suarez). Pink and other integralists claim that this strong thesis about a native or intrinsic right of the Church to the coercive power of the state is doctrinally binding on Catholics.7 But Pink's view of that indirect power is controversial among Catholic theologians. Theologians as noteworthy as Avery Dulles, Joseph Ratzinger, and John Henry Newman explicitly reject this interpretation that the Church has native or intrinsic rights to civil coercive authority.8 For my purposes, I will concede the Suarezian thesis and [End Page 1060] illustrate that it is theoretically independent of integralism. Indeed, I will argue that integralism is false even if the Church did have a claim to temporal coercive power of the state. Integralism is more than the Suarezian thesis, does not follow from it, and does not strictly require it.The essay will be structured as follows. I will begin by providing clarifications on the meaning and nature of the integralist thesis. Then I will propose two arguments to show that, even if the Suarezian thesis were true, it would not entail that integralist states are the ideal political arrangement. What I will show is that there is no good sense in which integralist states are politically ideal. This is not to say integralist states are always impermissible. There are constraints that integralists themselves accept on when integralist states are permissible, and only when these constraints are met is an integralist state supposed to be politically ideal. I will construe the constraints charitably. Then I will show both that integralism lacks any good justification for the claim that... (shrink)

This is an invited submission from the Editor-in-Chief as the introductory piece for an ‘Ethics Roundtable’. This piece will include invited commentaries from experts in surgical education, medical ethics, law and the prospective body donor perspective.

In this paper I discuss Hans Blumenberg’s The Rigorism of Truth, a short polemic that criticizes Freud and Hannah Arendt for placing a misplaced faith in the liberatory potential of rational truth in moments of historical disaster. The secondary literature suggests that this piece exhibits either all the signs of a late, Romantic capitulation to the ‘need’ for myth, or Blumenberg’s failure to recognize his own faith and debts to the ‘mythology’ of reason’s emancipatory hopes. My argument hinges on the (...) claim that these readings put undue emphasis on the philosophical anthropology component of Blumenberg’s work. Instead, I offer a new reading of the essay, in keeping with an alternative reading of his theory of myth. The essay transforms, then, from a polemic regarding the need for myth, into a nuanced description of the ways in which we can overestimate our capacity to overcome it. (shrink)

This article is a discussion of Plin.Ep. 7.29 andEp. 8.6, in which he presents his reaction to seeing the grave monument of Marcus Antonius Pallas, the freedman and minister of the Emperor Claudius, beside the Via Tiburtina. The monument records a senatorial vote of thanks to Pallas, and Pliny expresses intense indignation at the Senate's subservience and at the power and influence wielded by a freedman. This article compares Pliny's letters with Tacitus’ account of the senatorial vote of thanks to (...) Pallas atAnn. 12.52–3 and explores the differences between the ways in which the two authors encourage readers to relate to past events. It is noted that the Pallas letters are unusual amongst Pliny's letters for their treatment of material unconnected with the life and career of Pliny and his friends, and argued that inEp. 7.29 Pliny uses language and attitudes drawn from satire to evoke the past.Ep. 8.6 is read as an idiosyncratic piece of historical enquiry, considering Pliny's use of citation and his anonymization of historical individuals. Both letters are considered in the context of the surrounding letters, and a hypothesis is offered regarding the identity of their addressee Montanus, considering evidence from Tacitus’HistoriesandAnnals. Discussion of Tac.Ann.12.52–3 focusses on the use of irony. Pliny's evocation ofenargeia(‘vividness’) is compared with that of Tacitus. The article concludes with comparison of the historical accounts offered by Pliny and Tacitus through reflection on Juvenal,Satire1. (shrink)

Dear Editor,I was pleased to see a recent piece by Lao-Tzu Allan-Blitz entitled “Is It Ethical to Mandate SARS-CoV-2 Vaccinations among Incarcerated Persons?” I agree with the author that incarcera...

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Georg Simmel Reappears: “The Aesthetic Significance of the Face”James T. Siegel (bio)Michael Landmann, the editor of Georg Simmel’s collected works, tells this anecdote about him. Simmel had submitted a piece called “Psychological and Ethnological Studies on Music” as his doctoral dissertation. His examining committee refused to accept it. As the American translator of the piece retells Landmann’s anecdote, theyinstead granted the degree for a previously written distinguished study (...) on Kant’s monadology. While Zupitza [the committee’s chair] would have been willing to accept this study on music, if it were first “cleared of the numerous misspellings and stylistic errors,” Helmholtz was more skeptical: “Regardless of my other reservations, Simmel is entirely too confident in his conclusions. And the manner in which he presented the faculty with this piece which is so full of misspellings and stylistic superficialities, which evidently was not proofread, in which sentences which are cited from foreign languages can hardly be deciphered, does not attest to a great deal of reliability. Insofar, however, as he has quite a few illustrious predecessors for what he evidently takes to be the method or lack of method of scientific study, he may let them serve as some kind of personal excuse. I, however, believe that we will be doing him a greater service if we do not encourage him further in this direction.”[Landmann 17]1It seems it is Simmel’s fate to be dismissed yet still to be recognized, if not for the work at hand, for something else. Donald Levine, for instance, notes that in Talcott Parsons’s attempt to recuperate German and French sociology for the English-speaking world, there is no mention of Simmel. He says further that his studies of art “are not well known by art historians and critics” just as his work in the philosophy of history is ignored by historians. Simmel died in 1919, but there are still recurrent “discoveries” of Simmel, as witnessed by the sporadic bursts of translations into English. The Philosophy of Money, for instance, published in 1900, was not translated into English until 1978, the famous essay “The Stranger” in 1950, and so on. Just as Simmel left no students who worked in the way he did and no school of sociology, the revivals of Simmel, which usually are marked by a sense of anticipation (“now we will not only learn something; we will carry it forward”), tend to die away without leaving important (or at least recognizable) effects. [End Page 100]It is difficult to quote Simmel and to carry on his work through the usual modifications of something already in place. There is, instead, the attempt to present him “nonetheless.” Thus Donald Levine, to whom the English-speaking world is much indebted for his translations and presentations of Simmel, says: “[t]he presentation of a coherent account of the whole of Simmel’s social thought is complicated by the fact that coherence is generally not considered to be one of the hallmarks of Simmel’s writing” [11]. Levine writes this sentence in a piece he entitles “The Structure of Simmel’s Social Thought.” There are indeed a number of attempts to say what it is that Simmel was trying to do, as though readers had decided that Simmel is unclear but that “nonetheless” we can discern something of great value—just as his thesis committee in refusing his dissertation decided “nonetheless” that another piece would do. If Simmel did not deserve a degree for a piece on the ethnology and psychology of music, surely he deserved it for a work on Kant’s monadology. It seems to be Simmel’s talent to divert interest from whatever he is saying to something else—and always to something of interest and importance. Hence the fact that his influence is much greater than appears from the relative lack of citations to him and the absence not merely of a school of scholarship but of a style of writing traceable to him. His influence disappears at the moment it is most strongly felt. And just when he seems to be out of sight, forgotten, or used up, he reappears. 2Max Weber gives... (shrink)

One of the central tenets of Christian theology is the denial of self for the benefit of another. However, many views on the evolution of altruism presume that natural selection inevitably leads to a self-seeking human nature and that altruism is merely a façade to cover underlying selfish motives. I argue that human altruism is an emergent characteristic that cannot be reduced to any one particular evolutionary explanation. The evolutionary processes at work in the formation of human nature are not (...) necessarily in conflict with the possibility of altruism; rather, aspects of human nature are uniquely directed toward the care and concern of others. The relationship between altruism, human nature, and evolution can be reimagined by adopting an emergent view of the hierarchy of science and a theological worldview that emphasizes self-renunciation. The investigation of altruism necessitates an approach that analyzes several aspects of altruistic behavior at different levels in the hierarchy of sciences. This research includes the study of evolutionary adaptations, neurological systems, cognitive functions, behavioral traits, and cultural influences. No one level is able to offer a full explanation, but each piece adds a unique dimension to a much larger puzzle. (shrink)

. . . and I spread it out broader and clearer, and at last it gets almost finished in my head, even when it is a long piece, so that I can see the whole of it at a single glance in my mind, as if it were a beautiful painting of a handsome human being; in which way I do not hear it in my imagination at all as a succession - the way it must come later - but (...) all at once, as it were. (shrink)

This work has been selected by scholars as being culturally important, and is part of the knowledge base of civilization as we know it. This work was reproduced from the original artifact, and remains as true to the original work as possible. Therefore, you will see the original copyright references, library stamps (as most of these works have been housed in our most important libraries around the world), and other notations in the work. This work is in the public domain (...) in the United States of America, and possibly other nations. Within the United States, you may freely copy and distribute this work, as no entity (individual or corporate) has a copyright on the body of the work. As a reproduction of a historical artifact, this work may contain missing or blurred pages, poor pictures, errant marks, etc. Scholars believe, and we concur, that this work is important enough to be preserved, reproduced, and made generally available to the public. We appreciate your support of the preservation process, and thank you for being an important part of keeping this knowledge alive and relevant. (shrink)

When Gilson died in 1978, a great deal of his work on the history of philosophy, and specifically God, the primacy of existence or esse over essence, and the impact of Christianity on philosophy had been translated. A significant amount of material, however, has not yet appeared into English. The publication of Medieval studies represents a vital step in bringing these important works into the English-speaking world. The opening piece revisits a battle now won (and won in great measure by (...) Gilson’s efforts), namely the fight to acknowledge the very existence of medieval philosophy and win its place in the academic world. But the article also makes the effort--which becomes a connecting thread throughout the nine articles--to pinpoint the uniqueness of what Gilson calls Christian philosophy. All the articles give an insight into the great synthetic visions articulated by the better-known works of Gilson like The Spirit of Medieval philosophy. "The Middle Ages and ancient naturalism" contrasts Renaissance humanists and Reformers with the medievals on the defining issue of their attitude toward nature to understand who actually stands closer to the Greeks. In his examination of the Latin Averroist Boethius of Dacia’s book on the eternity of the world, Gilson finds that Boethius never expresses the view attributed to Latin Averroism that there are contradictory truths in religion and philosophy. The closing article studies the profound influence of the great Muslim thinker Avicenna on Latin Europe drawing a parallel between Avicenna’s work and that of the great Christian medievals like Thomas Aquinas and Duns Scotus. (shrink)

In discussing the Bible as literature, I am simply going to assume that the Bible, particularly in the King James version, is great literature. I am also going to take for granted the fact that its stories and themes have continually sparked the literary imagination of the West. From the story of Adam and Eve in the Garden to that of the Resurrection we have a set of symbols, motifs, and themes whose reworking has been the subject of the (...) bulk of our literature. I am not going to discuss this influence, nor even discuss the Bible as a piece of literature, i.e., as a particular literary work. What I am going to do is to focus on what is involved in our taking it as literature. More particularly, I am going to look at how we approach questions of truth in a literary work. I am going to ask how far we can push this approach when we come to read the Bible. What are the limits in reading the Bible as literature? When does the notion of “truth” as it arises in a literary text begin to fail us. That it will fail us at a certain point is implicit in the Bible’s claim to be “sacred scripture” or “revelation.” If we take this claim seriously, we naturally have a special approach to the “truth” its text contains. But what precisely is this approach? This is what I want to explore. In other words, my goal in exploring the limits of the literary approach to the Bible is to gain some insights into the sacred character of its text and how we should approach it. §1. Truth and the literary text. The most common, if often overlooked feature of a successful literary work is that of presenting us with a world In a certain sense, it succeeds by having inherent standards for what can belong to it, of what fits in with its sense and what does not. Having such standards, it presents us with that unified sense that makes a world a world, that is, that makes it an ordered whole.. (shrink)

The Jubilee Centre’s new report, Virtuous Character for the Practice of Law, sets about trying to examine the place of character and values in the legal profession in Britain. The report draws its findings from a UK focused survey of 966 lawyers and aspiring lawyers at varying stages of their careers. It is one of the largest pieces of research carried out in Britain focusing on issues of character and virtue within a specific industry sector.

The author is Associate Professor in the Federated Theological Faculty, University of Chicago and Chicago Theological Seminary. This work is “a Protestant interpretation of the part Christians must play in the economic and social world if the Christian faith is not to lose its vitality”, as the cover–piece declares. The Author’s thesis is that there are many difficult, unsolved problems in society and that Christians are obliged to engage themselves seriously in them if genuine religious vitality is to be fostered.

The music of Christoph Willibald von Gluck was a revolution for Paris operagoers when his work premiered there in 1774. In a setting known for its restive and often rowdy spectators, Alceste, Iphigénie en Aulide, and Orpheé et Eurydice seized audiences with unprecedented force. They shed silent tears or sobbed openly, and some cried out in sympathy with the sufferers onstage. “Oh Mama! This is too painful!” three girls called out as Charon led Alcestis to the underworld, and a boy (...) pleaded with his father to take him home. A woman who watched the same performance described falling on her knees in her opera-box as the march of the priests of Apollo began, staying in this position “suppliant and with my hands clasped until the end of the piece.”Gluck's streamlined musical language was one reason for these emotional responses. He and his librettist Ranieri de’ Calzabigi simplified the conventions by eliminating extraneous subplots, abandoning the repetitive da capo form, and replacing trills and runs with simpler melodies meant to convey passion. Another reason was the widespread culture of sentimentalism, which equated virtue with sincerity and judged tears to be the natural sign of an open heart. Painters depicted tender and tumultuous family scenes, and friends pledged trembling vows of fidelity. Listeners were also readers, and many described similar tearful responses when they read the century's bestseller, Rousseau's novel Julie; or, The New Heloise.Everist, a musicologist, takes up the story of Gluck in France in the nineteenth century, when the German composer remained a presence in repertoires. No longer prone to tears, the public was often indifferent and sometimes hostile to his works. Conductors and composers nevertheless persisted in promoting Gluck's music. Between 1828 and 1870, operatic excerpts appeared roughly twice a year in performances of the prestigious Société des Concerts, and the charismatic conductor Jules Pasdeloup regularly programmed his music. Many listeners remained unconvinced. A writer in 1861 described the “sepulchral boredom that reigned the length of all five acts” of Alceste. The periodical Monde dramatique used the same language to characterize Gluck's music: it was “profoundly boring.” After a high point of performances in the middle of Napoleon III's reign, Gluck disappeared from the Paris opera and concert stage for some thirty years.Everist's aim in this slim book is to isolate the “agents” involved in the French reception of Gluck. Traditional reception histories might begin with Gluck and his aims, identifying musical features, particular responses of audiences, critics’ accounts, and perhaps the more elusive temper of the times. Everist focuses instead on less conspicuous networks of impresarios, theater directors, and publishers. In his telling, such agents also include journalists and writers of fiction. The avowed effort is to decenter the artist and his art to emphasize the limited role that composers and librettists play in the performance of an opera. A quoted passage in the book reminds us that without parking attendants, stagehands, and ticket sellers the show could not go on. True enough. Genealogies of Music and Memory therefore provides tables listing Gluck arias in anthologies, particular singers’ performances, works by composers other than Gluck who also drew themes from classical antiquity, and works by other foreign-born composers. A section on “material culture” lists paintings and sculptures of Gluck in Paris theaters and museums.As a “genealogy,” the book is a salutary reminder of the web of amateurs and professionals who discuss, promote, and perform works that others have created. Writers such as E. T. A. Hoffmann, Mme de Staël, and Hippolyte Taine held up Gluck as the embodiment of German music. Hector Berlioz wrote frequently and enthusiastically about Gluck, although he was less keen to program his music. The singers François Delsarte and Pauline Viardot aroused temporary interest in Gluck by regularly including his arias in their recitals. Musical anthologies for the bourgeois household included piano arrangements of his best-known arias. Some nineteenth-century adaptations of his works were scored for the military band.Genealogies of Music and Memory is musicology with very little music. Everist's reliance on networks of actors, agents, publishers, pedagogical practices, and archival environments leads him to assert that “multiple agency is endemic in the story told here.” Unfortunately, it is often unclear just what the story is. Carelessness in writing and editing throughout—including a subject-verb clash in the book's final sentence—has rendered key passages obscure. Everist describes Delsarte's voice as feeble, broken, veiled, and ready to be extinguished twice in the same paragraph, first as a paraphrase and again in a quotation (with a misplaced comma).Decentering artists and their work to elevate others responsible for its reception brings attention to the unseen and often unsung. In the absence of particular performance histories, musical analyses and description, or sustained accounts of shared tastes or critical responses, however, conclusions remain piecemeal. Everist claims to have revealed a “Geertzian web of culture” in his study. A more modest account would describe it as an enumeration of references, revivals, editions, excerpts, and arrangements. (shrink)

Edward Jonathan Lowe (usually cited as E. J. Lowe) was one of the most significant philosophers of the twentieth and early twenty-first century. He made sustained and significant contributions to debates in metaphysics, ontology, philosophy of mind, philosophy of language, philosophical logic, and philosophy of religion, as well as contributing important scholarly work in early modern philosophy (most notably on Locke). Over the length of his career, Lowe published eleven single-authored books, four co-edited collections, and well over 300 papers and (...) book reviews in journals and edited volumes. The range of topics covered in his published work is highly eclectic. Given this, and his prolific rate of publication, this article cannot aim to cover all of the questions that Lowe contributed work on. Instead, it will focus on some of his most significant contributions in metaphysics and ontology, and related topics in other areas of philosophy. This choice of focus stems, in part, from Lowe’s strong belief in the inescapability of metaphysical questions. Lowe argued for the need to approach metaphysics, and philosophy more broadly, in a serious, systematic fashion, likening metaphysics to putting together the pieces of a gigantic jigsaw puzzle, working with, rather than trying to overrule or being secondary to, natural science. Although the sections in this article focus on different topics, the highly systematic nature of Lowe’s work means that there are many potential points of intersection that could be drawn between them. In the interests of providing a navigable summary of Lowe’s work, this article highlights only some of these connections. (shrink)

This volume is the first authoritative reference work to provide a truly comprehensive international description and analysis of multicultural education around the world. It is organized around key concepts and uses case studies from various nations in different parts of the world to exemplify and illustrate the concepts. Case studies are from many nations, including the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, France, Germany, Spain, Norway, Bulgaria, Russia, South Africa, Japan, China, India, New Zealand, Malaysia, Singapore, Indonesia, Brazil, and (...) Mexico. Two chapters focus on regions – Latin America and the French-speaking nations in Africa. The book is divided into ten sections, covering theory and research pertaining to curriculum reform, immigration and citizenship, language, religion, and the education of ethnic and cultural minority groups among other topics. With fortynewly commissioned pieces written by a prestigious group of internationally renowned scholars, _The Routledge International Companion to Multicultural Education_ provides the definitive statement on the state of multicultural education and on its possibilities for the future. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Fool’s Truth: Diderot, Goethe, and HegelJames SchmidtI. Of the many works that crossed from France into Germany during the “long” eighteenth century, none took as circuitous a route as Rameau’s Nephew. Begun by Diderot in 1761 but never published during his lifetime, the dialogue was among the works sent to Catherine the Great after his death in 1784. A copy of the manuscript was brought to Jena late (...) in 1804, where it was read by Schiller and passed on to Goethe, who immediately set about translating it into German. Goethe’s translation was published in the Spring of 1805 but, as Goethe later complained, made little impact on the German reading public. 1 There was, however, one notable exception: Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel.Hegel’s interpretation of Diderot’s dialogue in his 1807 Phenomenology of Spirit has long been an topic of considerable interest. Marxists—and, for that matter, Marx himself—have regarded the Phenomenology’s discussion of Diderot as illustrative of Hegel’s interest in the social and economic foundations of modern society. 2 For Lionel Trilling, it marked an important step in the genesis of the modern ideal of “authenticity.” 3 More recently, the tensions between Diderot’s “dialogizing” of the Enlightenment and the [End Page 625] Hegelian dialectic have been explored by a number of commentators. 4 Less attention, however, has been paid to the fact that the words Hegel appropriated were not, strictly speaking, Diderot’s, but rather came from Goethe’s translation. 5 Before Rameau’s Nephew could appear in the pages of Hegel’s Phenomenology, it first passed into German in a translation that, no less than Hegel, inserted the text into a rather different context from the one in which it had originated.A consideration of Hegel’s appropriation of Rameau’s Nephew thus involves us in questions about the transporting, translating, and transposing of works across borders, languages, and genres. I will begin by examining briefly how Goethe went about presenting an eighteenth century French text to a nineteenth-century German audience. I will then explore, at greater length, how Hegel went about situating this most peculiar of dialogues into his most baffling of books. Finally, I will reflect on some of the tensions between what Diderot wrote and what Hegel attempted to do with it.II. “Now, think of a city like Paris,” Goethe told Eckermann, bemoaning the “isolated, miserable sort of life” to which German intellectuals had been condemned. In Paris one could find “all of the leading minds of a great kingdom all together at the same spot, mutually instructing and advancing one another through daily contact, conflict, and rivalry.” The leading German intellectuals, in contrast, were scattered about: “There is one in Vienna, another in Berlin, another in Königsberg, another in Bonn or Düsseldorf, all fifty to a hundred miles away from each other, so that personal contact and personal exchange of ideas count as rare events.” In Paris “the best from the realms of nature and art from throughout the world lies open for daily inspection,” while “every passage over a bridge or a square recalls a mighty past” and “every street corner has evolved into a piece of history.” It was a city where “men such as Molière, Voltaire, Diderot, and the like have kept up a current of intellect such as has not been found in a single spot anywhere else in the entire world.” 6 Weimar, quite clearly, was not Paris.Rameau’s Nephew was so thoroughly a creature of Paris that the mere thought of rendering it into German might have dismayed a weaker soul than Goethe. Moi and Lui begin a conversation at the Café de la Régence that will [End Page 626] lead them from discussions of the contest between French and Italian styles in music to a consideration of the prospects for human autonomy. In between they will pass over such matters as the social utility of geniuses, the tension between aesthetics and morality, the proper upbringing of children, and the structure of social dependency, pausing from time to time as Lui loses himself in increasingly wilder pantomimes. Along the way... (shrink)

At some moment in his life, James Joyce stopped writing Ulysses. If there had been at least one more thing he meant to fuss with or to fix, one more thing he meant to do to the book, he never did it. Ulysses was at that moment complete.The book reads to me as if it’s “harking back in a retrospective sort of arrangement” from that very moment, as if Joyce anticipated coming to it all along.1 Because he knew it (...) would be a moment in which the book he was writing would become the book he had written, that moment backed up into the writing itself, it dictated to him that the narrator’s sentences must be in the past tense. For Joyce, each phrase of Ulysses was over and done with as soon as he found that he could let it stand as it was. I think it’s for this reason that his characters’ actions and words are narrated as if they too were in the past. “Stately, plump Buck Mulligan came from the stairhead, bearing a bowl of lather on which a mirror and a razor lay crossed. A yellow dressinggown, ungirdled, was sustained gently behind him by the mild morning air. He held the bowl aloft and intoned …” . The writing which empowers Buck Mulligan to speak and act had at some moment stopped being a present participle for Joyce and begun to be a noun, a piece of writing, that now-realized thing which had been written. It’s therefore in the past tense that the narrative proceeds.Not that along the way there isn’t interior monologue that offers what a given character thinks, each thought sounding very much as if it’s in the present. “Mr Bloom stood far back, his hat in his hand, counting the bared heads. Twelve. I’m thirteen” . The illusion is that right here, right now, autonomously, Bloom is thinking about how many mourners there are at Dignam’s funeral and is trying to establish their number for himself. And yet while the sentence fragments “Twelve” and “I’m thirteen” interrupt the already completed past-tense narrative, the past-tense sentence which introduces the fragments implies an intelligence that has managed to narrate Bloom’s thoughts before Bloom himself has thought them. To narrate that Bloom is “counting the bared heads” in advance of that counting is paradoxically to review what hasn’t yet happened. It implies a knowledge that looks back on each present moment from a point outside of time. And it’s from precisely this point that the narrating intelligence closes off Bloom’s present-tense thoughts with past-tense news: “The coffin dived out of sight, eased down by the men straddled on the gravetrestles” . James McMichael, professor of English at the University of California, Irvine, is completing a manuscript called Reading “Ulysses.” His most recent book of poems is Four Good Things. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Theoretical Remarks on Combined Creative and Scholarly PhD Degrees in the Visual ArtsJames Elkins (bio)The PhD in visual arts is inescapable: it is on the horizon. In just a few years, there will be a number of such programs in the United States, and if the trend mirrors the expansion of MFAs after the mid-1960s, then in a few decades the PhD will be the consensus "terminal" degree for (...) artists. Given that, it is pressing to consider how the degree might be theorized. In Australia and the United Kingdom, where the degrees already exist, their growth has been dictated in large measure by the existing educational structures and by the inevitable quest for funding. (In the United Kingdom, university departments get a disproportionate increase in their funding if they offer doctorate programs, and the same pattern occurs in state schools in America.) As a result, existing programs simply grow by exonomic necessity or opportunity, and so far they have not been well theorized apart from models already in use elsewhere in the university. Private universities and art schools in the United States are therefore well positioned to rethink the conceptual foundations of combined studio and scholarly PhDs, because they are largely freed of the temptation of increased funding and the obligation to fit the new programs into existing structures. In this essay, I propose eight configurations that such degrees might take. I close with three general observations about the future of such programs.Three pieces of background are necessary as introduction. First, the School of the Art Institute, Chicago, where I teach, is currently running an four-year undergraduate major in visual studies. Soon we will be expanding it into an MA and, in a few years, a PhD. At the BA level our program already has a large studio component. For that reason we have been looking at programs that offer comparable combinations of creative and scholarly work at the PhD level. Our own program, we hope, will be a place [End Page 22] where the possibilities of other programs can be kept open and continuously questioned.Second, this essay was originally a reader's report for a creative-arts PhD thesis called "Beyond the Surface: The Contemporary Experience of the Italian Renaissance," written by Jo-Anne Duggan for the University of Technology, Sydney. In fall 2003 Duggan was a candidate for the "DCA," Doctorate of Creative Arts." She is a photographer, and her special interest is photographing inside museums; her thesis explores the history and theory of that practice. The report I wrote for her was the basis of this essay, because I found that her thesis is a mixture of what I think are the eight principal possibilities for combining PhD-level scholarship and creative work.Third, this essay is the outgrowth of several colloquia that have been held at the College Art Association and at the Association of Independent Colleges of Art and Design/National Association of Schools of Art and Design (AICAD/NASAD) conferences (organizations of art school administrators). These ad hoc forums have been, so far, the only places where the new programs have been debated. I hope this essay can contribute to a more detailed discussion.Here are the eight configurations. The first five are (or will be) common, and the last two are rare but preferable.1. The thesis is art history, intended to inform the art practice. The most obvious relation between scholarship and creative work is that the former informs the latter. The artist positions her scholarship so that it supports her art practice. Within this possibility, perhaps the most common option would be to write an art historical thesis, covering the history of practices that lead up to the writer's own practice. Among the advantages would be that, in theory, the candidate would be able to go on to teach in a department of art history. In terms of her practice, the idea would be that historical knowledge strengthens art practice: a debatable point, if only because so many artists have done so well by ignoring or distorting the relevant history. In Canberra in summer 2003, I met a recent PhD whose thesis was on... (shrink)

We count apples and divide a cake so that each guest gets an equal piece; we weigh galaxies and use Hilbert spaces to make amazingly accurate predictions about spectral lines. It would seem that we have no difficulty in applying mathematics to the world; yet the role of mathematics in its various applications is surprisingly elusive. Eugene Wigner has gone so far as to say that “the enormous usefulness of mathematics in the natural sciences is something bordering on the mysterious (...) and that there is no rational explanation for it” (1960, p. 223). The issue is not much discussed under the heading “applied mathematics,” yet it is pivotal to several philosophical debates. In recent years three rather general questions have been central: (1) Just how does mathematics “hook onto” the world? This is the main concern of a rather technical branch of philosophy of science known as measurement theory (see measurement). (2) Are some of the objects referred to in various theories merely mathematical objects, or do they have some other status? This problem often comes up in the philosophy of the special sciences. For example, do space‐time and the quantum state exist in their own right, separate from their mathematical representations; or are they nothing but mathematical entities? (3) Is mathematics essential for science? Following Hartry Field's work, this has become a focal point in the debate between realists and nominalists in the philosophy of mathematics. (shrink)

In this article, I pay special expository attention to two pieces of philosophically relevant Wittgenstein–Russell correspondence from the period leading up to the ultimate demise of Russell's Theory of Knowledge manuscript (in June 1913). This is done in the hopes of shedding light on Wittgenstein's notoriously obscure criticisms of Russell's multiple relation theory of judgement. I argue that these two pieces of correspondence (the first, a letter from Wittgenstein to Russell dated January 1913, and the second, a letter (...) from Russell to Ottoline Morrell, reporting a tense confrontation with Wittgenstein on 26 May 1913) each refer to what is more or less the same approach to problems concerning the unity and well-formedness of propositions or judgements. However, the view advanced in Wittgenstein's January letter to Russell nevertheless differs in a key respect from the view of Russell's referred to in the May letter to Morrell. The difference involves Wittgenstein's incorporating qualities and relations as unsaturated parts of the copulae of atomic complexes, where these copulae are in turn conceived as logical forms. Because such an approach to logical form (and more specifically, to relations) was philosophically unpalatable to Russell, he undertook an alternative theoretical correction in the context of his 1913 Theory of Knowledge manuscript. This theoretical correction was discussed with Wittgenstein during the tense confrontation on 26 May, and involved deploying a supplemental significance constraint on judgements. It was this significance constraint on judgements, moreover, which was the ‘premiss’ alluded to by Wittgenstein in the context of a June 1913 letter to Russell, wherein he claims to express his objection to Russell's theory ‘exactly.’. (shrink)

ABSTRACTCollingwood's The New Leviathan is a difficult text. It comprises philosophy, political theory, political opinion and history in what is sometimes an uneasy amalgam. Despite its being the culmination of thirty years of work in ethics and political theory, the final text was clearly affected by the adverse circumstances under which it was written, these largely being Collingwood's illness which increasingly affected his ability to work as the writing of The New Leviathan progressed. This paper seeks to disentangle the composition (...) of the book thereby shedding light on its distinctive character as the last substantial piece of philosophical work published in Collingwood's lifetime. (shrink)

A few years ago, this page of the Journal of Military Ethics offered Martin Cook’s and Henrik Syse’s penetrating essay about the nature of military ethics. That piece continues...

In a recent paper, Maslow has suggested that we turn from means-centering to problem-centering in science. In two other papers the present author offered a theoretical foundation which would make Maslow's suggestions psychologically sound. For as he suggests, it is only by centering ourselves towards the task that the task is accomplished or towards the problem that the problem is solved. This does not mean that methods or means, or, in the broader sense, of means as ends or of ends (...) per se, do not constitute problems. The whole problem of psychology is the means by which the organism obtains knowledge; the problem of education is that of means, or the problem of communication is one of means, or of any profession, e.g., engineering or medicine, the problem may be of means as a problem. Whichever is the case it is only so far as problems are solved that we are free to go on to tackle new ones or throw light on the more basic ones and thus enrich our lives. Problem solving, of course, does not mean that particular problems as framed are solvable. For example, if the rules state that one must connect each dot with every other dot on a piece of paper with lines that do not intersect, a four dot problem is solvable but a five dot situation cannot be resolved within these rules. In the latter case it may mean that the problem becomes: “can anyone solve it?” This has been the lesson of the mathematicians and the logical positivists. But what is problem solving? (shrink)

Comparisons of Ludwig Wittgenstein and John Cage typically focus on the “later Wittgenstein” of the Philosophical Investigations. However, in this article I focus on the deep intellectual sympathy between the “early Wittgenstein” of the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus—with its evocative and controversial invocation of silence at the end, the famous proposition 7: “Whereof we cannot speak, thereof we must be silent”—and Cage's equally evocative and controversial work on the same theme—his “silent piece,” 4′33″. This sympathy expresses itself not only in the common (...) aim of the two works (a mystical appreciation for the ordinary, everyday world that surrounds us) but also in a shared methodology for bringing about this aim (tracing the limits of language from within in order to transcend those very limits). In this sense, I argue that Cage's work gives a concrete, performative reality to Wittgenstein's early conception of language as well as the mystical revelation that lies behind it. (shrink)

Thinkers as diverse as Kuhn and Salmon agree that should an account of scientific rationality not square with actual scientific practice, then this should be considered as a reductio ad absurdum of the proposed norms and not be taken as evidence that the history of science is in large measure irrational. While many are willing to accept the need to do justice to the history of science as a constraint on the acceptability of any candidate theory of scientific method, very (...) few are willing to use the history of science as evidence in the positive, confirming sense. However, some are; and I join them in believing that the history of science can be used as evidence for or against the various rival normative philosophies of science. That is, of the competing accounts which claim to be the scientific method , the history of science provides the sort of evidence which can lead to a choice from among them. ;This, then, is my starting point: There is a history-methodology evidential relationship. The problem to be tackled is how to characterize this relationship. Just how does what scientists have actually done support or refute an account of what scientists ought to do? This is the main quesion the thesis is devoted to answering. ;Starting from the same assumption that there is a history-methodology evidential relationship, Lakatos and Laudan have given accounts of just what the relationship is. They are critically investigated here and found wanting. ;The account which I think correct and which I defend is along these lines: That normative philosophy of science is correct which best is able to reconstruct the history of science so that it is maximally rational while maintaining a coherence with our best theories in other domains, e.g., psycho-social theories. In arguing for such an account of the history-methodology relation there are many difficulties to overcome. One is that the history of science has to be written up in order for it to be used as evidence. But such an historiography is loaded with normative concepts, so is it not the case that the testing procedure is circular? This is a problem of long standing, but it is shown that the account of testing rival methodologies that I offer will completely obviate the difficulty. This is one piece of strong evidence for my account, and others come from the fact that it overcomes the difficulties that I see in the accounts of Lakatos and Laudan. . . . UMI. (shrink)

It has been almost eighty years since Paul Dirac delivered a lecture on the relationship between mathematics and physics and since 1960 that Eugene Wigner wrote about the unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics in the natural sciences. The field of cosmology and efforts to define a more comprehensive theory have changed significantly since the 1960s; thus, it is time to refocus on the issue. This paper expands on ideas addressed by these two great physicists, specifically, the ultimate effectiveness of mathematics to (...) describe nature. After illustrating how theoretical physic predicted discoveries, the concepts of established theories are summarized. Then, the “world equation” which combines all key physics theories is conceptually described. As the possible last piece of the puzzle, String Theory is briefly defined. And last, a cursory overview of an extreme proposal is presented — the world as a mathematical object. However, there is no fundamental reason to believe that math will allow mankind to completely comprehend nature. If math does not provide a comprehensive theory, nature will retain her secrets. (shrink)

The death of a person is a tragedy while the explosion of a lifeless galaxy is a mere firework. The moral difference is grounded in the nature of humans: humans have intrinsic worth, a worth that makes their fate really matter. This is the worth proposed as the foundation of ethics. Ethics in the usual sense of right and wrong actions, rights and virtues, and how to live a good life, is founded on something more basic that is not itself (...) about actions, namely the worth of persons. Human moral worth arises from certain properties that distinguish humans from the rest of creation (though some animals share a lesser degree of those properties): rationality, consciousness, the ability to act for reasons, emotional structure and love, individuality. This complex package makes humans the "piece of work" of which Hamlet says, “How noble in reason, how infinite in faculty." The Worth of Persons establishes a foundation for ethics in the equal worth of persons, which makes ethics absolutely objective and immune to relativist attacks because it is based on the metaphysical truth about humans. Endless debate about ethical dilemmas, rules, and principles fails to connect with what is really important ethically, that is, what makes humans matter. (shrink)